Author Archives: basiltsiokos

Coming to PBS’s Independent Lens tonight, Monday, April 1:
TRE MAISON DASAN

Director:
Denali Tiller

Premiere:
San Francisco 2018

Select Festivals:
DOC NYC, Cleveland, IFF Boston, Montclair, AFI Docs, Rhode Island, Heartland, Raindance, Cucalorus, Big Sky Doc, Thessaloniki Doc, NewportFilm

About:
A profile of three young boys whose parents are in prison.

The film screened as part of DOC NYC, for which our program notes read:
While his father serves a prison sentence, Tre, 13, has his own run-ins with the law. Maison, a hyperactive 11-year-old with Asperger’s, is raised by his grandmother while his beloved dad is behind bars. Finally reunited with his mother, six-year-old Dasan must confront the truth behind her time away. This compelling portrait of growing up with absent role models poses raw and meaningful questions about justice and the cultural, societal, and economic implications of mass incarceration.

Coming to theatres today, Friday, March 29:
AMERICAN RELAPSE

Directors:
Pat McGee and Adam Linkenhelt

Premiere:
Rhode Island 2018

Select Festivals:
Cleveland, Orlando, Anchorage, Montana

About:
A candid look at America’s heroin epidemic through the perspective of recovering addicts helping others navigate rehab.

Focused on the “rehab capital of America,” Delray Beach FL, McGee and Linkenhelt’s eye-opening and at times harrowing film profiles Allie and Frankie, two longtime heroin addicts in recovery who have devoted themselves to helping others get clean. As these two advocates quickly reveal, they are part of a growing, and, for some, lucrative industry that has developed to deal with the heroin epidemic. While some so-called junkie hunters have exploited this situation, working the health insurance system to profit off of users’ cycles of recovery and relapse, Allie and Frankie are not in it for the money. Throughout this compelling and wisely tightly contained doc, which roughly covers about 3 days, they attempt to help other addicts – including one of Allie’s friends – into rehab, with varying levels of success, all while risking their own sometimes tenuous relationship to sobriety.

THE LEGEND OF COCAINE ISLAND

Director:
Theo Love

Premiere:
Tribeca 2018

Select Festivals:
Tallgrass, Cucalorus, BendFilm, Sidewalk, Traverse City, American Film Festival Poland

About:
A far-fetched tale of hidden illicit treasure captures the attention of a hapless man desperate for money.

Rodney Hyden carved out a measure of success for his family as a small business owner in Florida, but then the Great Recession struck, and he lost everything. Seeking a way to get back on track, he hears a crazy story from a neighbor involving a bag of cocaine that was secreted away on the Puerto Rican island of Culebra, alleged to be worth $2 million. Despite the lack of any practical knowledge of the drug trade, or any real connections that could facilitate the sale of cocaine – nor, pointedly, any apparent concern about placing kilos of hard drugs onto the streets – Hyden concocts a hare-brained scheme to visit the Caribbean island and retrieve the buried treasure. The level of his ineptitude can be measured by noting that his first attempt fails because he forgot to bring a shovel, but his missteps don’t end there. Director Theo Love, noting a good story when he hears one, appropriately spins his own wild tale out of the proceedings, bringing style and humor to this recounting of his hapless protagonist’s misadventures. At the same time, missing in this lighter approach to this stranger than fiction episode is an acknowledgement of how Hyden’s privilege figures in to his ultimate reckoning, a stark contrast to how other individuals from different racial and class backgrounds caught up in similar illegal activities are typically treated. Leaving that systemic issue aside, Love’s film succeeds in demonstrating the seduction of storytelling, and in an entertaining manner.